DEA Agents Accused of Running Creepy Jersey Strip Club

May 21, 2015

Before we rush to judgment, who among us hasn’t run a secret strip club in violation of national security rules and knowingly employed undocumented workers and threatened people with a government-issued firearm? I mean, glass houses, right?

Two Manhattan-based agents with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration were charged in federal court yesterday for allegedly running a New Jersey strip club called the Twins Plus Go-Go Lounge, in South Hackensack, unbeknownst to their bosses.

According to charging documents filed yesterday, David Polos and Glen Glover, both veteran agents, lied about their ownership stake in the club and spent a good deal of time running what seems like a less-than-squeaky-clean operation; allegations in the indictment suggest that the club featured “relatively frequent incidents of prostitution and human trafficking,” among other things.

Agents in the DEA aren’t permitted to have unapproved outside employment, a measure designed to reduce the potential for blackmail, a risky proposition for feds with access to sensitive information. During a periodic security interview, the agents allegedly concealed the source of some questionable income and failed to disclose that they had been helping run the place.

And help they did, according to court documents. Text messages and email exchanges going back at least to 2011 suggest the two agents were deeply involved in the, um, nitty-gritty of running the club. In a text message in 2011, Polos scolded his alleged co-manager (a non–DEA agent who, just by the by, repeatedly used the term “colored” to refer to some of the club’s dancers) because there were “condoms everywhere” in one of the back rooms, where “private lap dances” and apparently some other things went on.

Some of the club’s employees allegedly knew that Polos and Glover were DEA agents, although Polos occasionally told others that he worked for the FBI. “On at least one occasion, Glover wore a bulletproof vest to Twins Plus,” the indictment says, while Polos allegedly “used his status as a law enforcement officer to facilitate the club’s operations, including displaying his firearm in connection with a dispute among those operating the club.”

The indictment suggests that the agents were fully aware that dancers frequently performed more naked-ish than New Jersey law allows; clubs serving alcohol, which Twins does, must require their dancers to have their “private areas, including nipples” covered up. That rule allegedly had “not always been observed,” according to a rather delicate first-person footnote relating to an FBI agent’s surveillance of the place.

The accused also allegedly knew full well that many of the dancers, whom the indictment says were mostly from Brazil and Russia, were not citizens and not authorized to be in the country. They knew this, the indictment says, because dancers were asked, during the hiring process, whether they were citizens, and “frequently indicated” in writing that no, they were not.

According to the New York Times, Polos has already resigned his position at the DEA, where he worked as a supervisor on the state’s Organized Crime and Drug Task Force. Glover has reportedly been placed on administrative leave.